Power and Purity: The Unholy Marriage That Spawned America's Social Justice Warriors - Couverture rigide

Mitchell, Mark T.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1684510112 ISBN 13 : 9781684510115

Editeur : Regnery Gateway, 2020

Synopsis

A Marriage Made in Hell

Where did they come from, these furiously self-righteous “social justice warriors”?

The growing radicalism and intolerance on the American left is the result of the strange union of Nietzsche’s “will to power” and a secularized Puritan moralism. In this penetrating study, Mark T. Mitchell explains how this marriage made in hell gave birth to a powerful and destructive political and social movement.

Having declared that “God is dead,” Friedrich Nietzsche identified the “will to power” as the fundamental force of human life. There is no good or evil in a Nietzschean world—only the interests of the strong. Reason and the common good have no place there.

The Puritan, by contrast, is morally rigorous, zealous to promote virtue and punish vice. America’s Puritan tradition, now thoroughly de-Christianized, has been reduced to a self-righteous moral absolutism that focuses on the faults of others, intent on avenging the sins of society, institutions, and the past in pursuit of the secularized ideals of equality, diversity, and social justice.

As Nietzsche’s ideas have permeated our culture, a new generation of radicals has embraced the rhetoric and tactics of the will to power. But the strength of America’s residual Puritanism keeps them only half-baked Nietzscheans. More Christian than they care to admit, they cling to a moralism that Nietzsche would despise.

The incoherence of their mixed creed dooms social justice warriors to perpetual frustration. Their identity politics generates ever more radical demands that can never be satisfied, further fracturing a society in desperate need of a unifying myth. We seem to be left with only two options, Mitchell concludes—Nietzsche or Christ, the will to power or the will to truth. The choice is bracingly simple.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Mark T. Mitchell, who took his doctorate in political theory from Georgetown University, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. He has written on Polanyi, Eric Voegelin, and Michael Oakeshott for various journals and is currently finishing a book on rootlessness and democracy.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Regnery Gateway
• Date d'édition: 2020
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1684510112
• ISBN 13: 9781684510115
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 256
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible